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Rain Chances Finally Show Up

July 7, 2013 7:57 PMBy Jeff Ray

Seven days into July and not a drop of rain at DFW airport. It’s actually been 19 days since the last measurable rain. For the year we are now more than 5″ short:

Moisture from the Gulf of Mexico is pouring into north Texas tonight. You’ll likely notice the increased humidity by tomorrow morning. A upper air through is moving west over south Texas out of the Gulf to provide some rain chances:

Coverage isn’t great but severe weather isn’t expected. Given how much water vapor is in the air overhead by tomorrow we could see some isolated heavy rain. We’ll be optimistic and put the the rain chance around 20% for the metro area. The best chances will be southeast:

There will be backdoor cold front moving toward the Red River on Thursday. We’ll include a slight chance (20%) of storms for the northeast corner of our area centered on Paris and Bonham.

A rather interesting weather pattern sets up at the end of the weekend. Remember that cool start to July when morning lows dropped near record lows? This was caused (in a large part) but an upper-level low moving backwards (west) toward east Texas and Oklahoma. This retrograde motion again shows up in the forecast models.

We first have to get though some hot and dry weather. I expect triple digit highs by Friday and Saturday as we sit just under the eastern edge of a dome of high pressure:

Then another through develops over the Great Lakes. This happened earlier this month:

This is forecast to create a cut-off low that will start to drift toward the us on Saturday.

By Sunday it should be close enough to drop the temperatures, bring in some cloud cover and provide some storms. Right now I’ll put in a 20% storm chance on Sunday.

If this unsual pattern does develop as forecast, the better chance of rain will be on Monday:

It would also REALLY drop the temperatures. We could have highs in the low 80’s! This is such a rare weather pattern for July we’ll have to take a wait and see attitude. But given the dry conditions (87% of state in some state of drought) lets hope it pans out.

Jeff joined CBS 11 and TXA 21 in December 2010. He came to North Texas from Nashville, where he spent the past 11 years, most recently as the morning meteorologist at WKRN-TV. His career has also taken him to Kansas City, Mo., where he was the seni...